


favored sting of winter sun

by discokonomi



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: A gaggle of OCs - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Ear Piercings, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Feelings Realization, Gen, Healing, Insecure Kyan Reki, Kyan Reki's inability to accept that he is loved, M/M, Minor Nanjo Kojiro | Joe/Sakurayashiki Kaoru | Cherry Blossom, Oblivious Kyan Reki, POV Kyan Reki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-22 23:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30046452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/discokonomi/pseuds/discokonomi
Summary: After S, Reki mopes, gets an ear piercing, accidentally adopts a small army of children, and wonders why Langa stares at him in class all the time.---"But Reki finds that the world agrees with him like this; that maybe he is still a favored son of Okinawa. He might not burn as brightly, not soar as high, but he’s still part of something beautiful. With every push against the pavement, every grind, every gravity defying leap into the air, he redefines and transforms the world around him."---Or: Reki Kyan learns to be loved.Canon-divergent after 9.5.
Relationships: Hasegawa Langa/Kyan Reki
Comments: 111
Kudos: 537
Collections: warm me up like soup





	1. I've clawed my way out of here before

**Author's Note:**

> This is an incredibly self indulgent fic that started as a bit of fluff surrounding the idea of Langa being obsessed with Reki after he gets an ear piercing, and turned into a weirdly elaborate discussion of what might happen after Reki leaves S. 
> 
> It features: a small gaggle of OCs, to make up for the fact that there are like 10 named characters in Sk8 and most of them are deeply involved with S; a lot of Reki willfully ignoring the fact that the people around him care about him and love him; no real understanding of the concept of time or seasons; a lot of introspection.
> 
> It also features: An examination of what can make us happy; how we can get ourselves to the point where we're vulnerable enough to accept other people's love; a lot of gen character interactions; Reki's truly 'head full, too many thoughts, I refuse to acknowledge that people care about me' POV.
> 
> CW: in depth discussions of ear piercings/the healing process

_You tell yourself it's raining_

_The clouds are in your head_

_You tell yourself it's better_

_To jump before you fall again_

_Before you lose it all again_

_-Joy Oladokun, look up_

  
  


Langa is staring at him again.

It's been months, now, since everything went down. Their classmates have stopped needling them for information - they’re convinced it’s a breakup, and everyone’s siding with Langa no matter what either of them say - and things are almost back to pre-Langa normal for Reki.

Almost.

There’s this one small problem: Langa won't stop trying to drill a hole into the side of his head with just his eyes.

Even without seeing his reflection in the window, Reki can tell Langa is looking. His pointed gaze casts a chill onto Reki, one that travels down his spine before spreading through the rest of his torso and body, leaving him desperate for more layers even when the sun is pouring in through the windows. Langa’s stare shoots a core of ice directly into the side of his head, straight from the Canadian mountainside, courtesy one SNOW.

It’s a distraction - but at least it’s one that’s more a problem for Langa than Reki, when he thinks about it. Reki can compartmentalize. He did it well enough before Langa came into his life and everything came crashing together. He’s used to not paying attention in class, and now - forced to at least entertain the notion of understanding calculus instead of acknowledging his gaze - his grades are, if not skyrocketing, arcing upwards in a gentle incline.

Langa’s, meanwhile, are heading straight downhill toward the finish line at Crazy Rock. Reki only knows this under duress, their teacher pulling him aside during lunch one day to ask if everything’s alright, if he needs to move Langa’s seat.

“No, no, it’s fine, I’m fine. Everything’s chill!” Reki had said, grinning, like a liar. 

(Langa, offered the same proposal with a slightly more pointed and direct speech, also refused.)

So now they’re here; Langa’s staring at him again, but it’s not his fault, honest!

Okay, maybe it’s a little bit his fault - he knows that Langa’s eyes aren’t on his whole face. He’s not sneaking glances below his lowered lids, hiding his face behind a book to look at Reki through a sideways stare.

No, he’s full blown torso turned, books closed, pencil hidden somewhere in his desk, staring, both of his eyes laser focused on the small, silver ball nestled in the meat of his earlobe.

He knows exactly what Langa’s staring at, he knows exactly how it got there, and he knows that this is definitely, absolutely, without a doubt, his fault.

Reki Kyan’s a little fucked.

\---

  
  


It’s a long story, and it all kinda started the same way everything else did - Reki trying, desperately, to hold on to what makes him happy.

Freed from S he learns to love skating again, to propel his body through the world like he’s flying. He’d forgotten what it was like to skate free of pathos. Absent the ever present tang of competition, unmoored by the ego-hit of comparison - without that burning desire to win at all costs, it’s almost like soaring.

_When you’re not trying to win_ , Reki realizes, _there’s no way to fail._

In the bright light of the morning after quitting S, it’s hard to care that it took him two months to learn an ollie, that he’ll never reach Langa’s heights on the gantry wall. It’s more than enough to feel the asphalt rumble against his wheels, let every bump and crack in the pavement roll through his whole body. 

To feel connected, all at once, to the world around him. 

Learning to love again is a hard process; learning to be loved is harder still.

But Reki finds that the world agrees with him like this; that maybe he is still a favored son of Okinawa. He might not burn as brightly, not soar as high, but he’s still part of something beautiful. With every push against the pavement, every grind, every gravity defying leap into the air, he redefines and transforms the world around him.

Skating is an act of creation. 

And the world Reki creates - imbued with his own love - loves him in return.

He just has to _see_ it first. 

\---

  
  


He’s still working at _Dope Sketch._ So is Langa.

All things considered, it could be worse.

He goes in after school, on the weekends. He tunes up boards, tightens wheels, fits kids barely older than 10 for helmets so they don’t scramble their brains across the pavement while their nervous parents look on. Bravery at that age is less stupidity and just a lack of knowledge; they’re fearless, because they don’t know what to fear. Reki, covered in scars and bruises and cuts, gives them a taste of the future they’ll learn to love.

(Reki knows what to fear - the pain, the injury, the selfish isolating loneliness - but he thinks he knows what to love, now.)

Ghosts from his past come by like he’s in an American holiday film.

First, and most often, is Miya.

“Hello Mr. Slime,” he greets, pushing open the door with his shoulder and cradling his board like a precious kitten.

Reki, leaning against the counter like Manager Oka doesn’t have an ever growing to-do list, taps his fingers against his chin. “Ah, but I thought I was upgraded to a golem,” he says.

Miya holds his board out for Reki to grab. “If you fix this, you’ll level up,” he replies. When Reki takes the board, it’s obvious there’s nothing wrong with it. A little tightening of the wheels, a quick buff to wipe out a scrape, and it’s as good as new, maybe shines a little brighter. It's trust, is what it is.

He undercharges Miya, only accepts a few hundred yen coins that he throws into a jar marked _Miya’s Protein Milk Fund,_ and watches him try and fail to pet Oka’s fox, before taking pity on him and showing him the best places to scratch to provoke affection. He thinks that's what Miya needs more than anything else - something unconditional, soft, sweet. A distraction from the crushing need to be the best, from the lonely point at the top of the hill, from the friendship he's partially severed from him.

It’s always when he hands the board back that Miya dithers. He wanders around the shop, looking at wheels, knee pads, other equipment. Miya figured out his ideal set up years ago; he’s definitely not looking to change it. Reki learns to let Miya take his time, that sometimes you need to let a wild animal come to its senses, or tire out, or something.

When it happens, it happens. The store is always empty when it does, Langa out on a delivery, Oka in the back. Miya sets his board up against the wall, steels himself. “You never… anymore,” he hedges. “Why don’t you come?”

Reki knows Miya deserves an honest answer he can’t give right now; one day, maybe. “It’s not my place anymore,” he shrugs. “But I’ll come to your next exhibition,” he says, moving closer to Miya, poking him in the shoulder, then squishing his cheeks. “I’ll be your one man cheer squad. I’ll have a big sign, confetti, get the most embarrassing pics from your mom. Your number one supporting slime, that’s me!”

He monologues, spouting nonsense, until Miya blooms with a surprised giggle that turns into a shameless, wild laugh, then they’re hugging each other and smiling and laughing until Oka comes out from his office to see what havoc is being wrought upon his store.

Miya leaves, but Miya always comes back; one day, Reki will have the right answer for him.

  
  


\---

  
  


Second, and less often, is Cherry.

It takes him a while. Reki missed it somehow, somehow, in the midst of everything, but when he strides through the doors of _Dope Sketch_ he does it without Carla, accessorizing with a dark scar across his face and a thicker than usual wrist brace.

Reki doesn’t ask, but he can guess. 

Cherry’s first purchase is a classic, simple skateboard. With his typical gravitas, he magnanimously allows Reki full authority to design the art on the bottom of the deck. 

“Are you sure you don’t want anything special?” Reki presses. “Traditional designs? Calligraphy? I might need your help with that, though.” 

Cherry closes his eyes, hums absently in thought. “I know what I don’t want,” he says. “No blue.” 

_There goes the sky,_ Reki thinks. _And the sea._

Reki wavers over it for days, putting together moodboards and daydreaming of color stories in class. He doodles flowers endlessly across the outer edges of his notebooks. When his fingertips grow cold he knows that Langa is watching them grow in graphite. He sees something like approval and understanding in Langa's reflection in the window. _I don't need that,_ he thinks.

_But it is nice,_ he acknowledges later, on the precipice of sleep, cocooned in blankets. 

He wants it to be good for Cherry; wants it to be something special, something he can love.

The design Reki chooses interweaves pop art cherry blossoms with twining branches of bamboo, and a hidden hibiscus or two. It’s flashy - far from the traditional aesthetics Cherry coats himself in. It carries a little bit of Reki in it, and he hopes that’s enough to make up for whatever he’s so clearly missed. When Cherry picks it up, he stares at it for almost five minutes, smiling something soft Reki feels nervous seeing.

“What happened to Carla?” He asks, while Cherry taps his card to pay.

He looks pensive for a moment, piercing him with his eyes. “I’m going back to basics,” he says. “Figure out what I love.”

And Reki can only nod. Everytime he comes afterward - for a tune-up, for new wheels, for anything - Reki overcharges him a little bit, and Cherry bites back his snipe.

  
  


\---

  
  


It takes a long time for Joe to come in. It's a while after Cherry's first visit; sometime after everything's finally finished, if he reads between the lines of Cherry's words and the disappearance of the Monday morning dark circles under Langa's eyes. 

(Once or twice, though he's loath to admit it, he'd grabbed a can of Langa's preferred energy drink and left it at his seat, leaving enough time for it to still be cold enough to drink but not cold enough to sting. Every time, Langa would look at the can with awe written across his face, running his hands across the label, like he knew who put it there.)

When he comes in, there's no real pretense. Joe picks up spare wheels, looks down at him from his towering height. "I'm sorry," he says.

Reki would wave it off, say something pithy and self-depreciating in response, but just as he's trying to get the words out, he actually looks at Joe.

There's something in his eyes - something a little blank and haunted - that transports Reki to a time and a place. Suddenly it's years ago, and he's staring at himself in the mirror of a hospital bathroom after visiting his friend for the first time since the accident, too drained to cry but still wounded enough to feel.

It's not something he'd wish on anyone. He wraps a blanket around his defensive inner core to muffle the sound, dampen it. Then he scans Joe's wheels and grabs his arm when he hands them back, takes a deep breath. "You have nothing to apologize for; you've helped me more than you could ever imagine."

And Joe - who definitely isn't wrung out as much as Reki thought, oh no _oh no -_ starts leaking tears. "Yeah, but I don't think I helped you enough," he says, gamely refusing to acknowledge what his eyes are betraying.

If he has to build up to honesty with Miya, something about Joe commands it. Maybe it's because he's older and seems to have been through it before. Maybe it's because Miya's not the type of person to have a complete crying breakdown in public.

Maybe it’s because no one’s ever treated Joe with a soft touch, but a rock that is only tumbled with other rocks loses its harsh edges eventually. 

Regardless, Reki looks around at the shop - specifically, for the empty space where the motorbike is to make sure Langa isn't coming back for a while, and takes a deep breath.

"There's," he starts and stops immediately, reaching under the counter to hand him a box of tissues. "There's nothing you could have done differently, Joe," he begins again. "I think this was bound to happen sometime - and it's for the best, for me, at least. Which is maybe a little selfish, but sometimes maybe that's what we need?"

Joe nods. "Selfish," he repeats, stream of tears slowing. "I can get behind that."

  
  


\---

  
  


He hasn't seen Shadow in weeks.

  
  


\---

  
  


There are moments when Langa and Reki are in the shop together that feel like muscle memory.

When things are slow and they're flipping through a new skating magazine at the front counter. Their shoulders are almost pressed together, a scant inch of space between them, and the air between them is superheated. Langa remembers exactly how long it takes for Reki to read a page with only text, versus a page filled with diagrams he wants to examine. Reki, too, knows when Langa’s eyes want to linger on a spectacular vista or trick, and when both of them are bored out of their skulls and just want to move on.

Sometimes a particularly rude customer comes in - almost always a parent - and their eyes find each other from across the store while Manager Oka tries to soothe the person yelling. They both shudder in unison.

And they share matching yelps of glee when someone nails a particularly difficult trick on whatever skating video the store is playing that day.

But all muscles ache, and when they reach the end of the magazine, or the customer leaves, placated, or the video loops back around, things are back to normal. Reki can feel the chill of Langa's gaze as it follows him around the store. They make stilted conversation when they pass the mop and broom around. 

They're cordial; and Manager Oka, watching, despairs.

  
  


\---

  
  


It took a solid week of early morning skating, alternating with moping, after turning in his pin for his oldest younger sister Nanae to get really, really upset.

"You have to stop being such a slug, what is wrong with you?" She yells - or really, raises her voice a little bit over her normal speaking volume. She's old enough that she doesn't throw tantrums anymore, but young enough that showing genuine human emotion is considered a moral failing. She's settled on disaffected coolness for her general cadence.

If their mom hadn't already gone through Reki's younger adolescence, tumultuous and traumatic as it was, she'd be kicking rocks by now. As it stands, she rolls her eyes fondly and tells them to get back to their chores - Reki pruning the hibiscus, Nanae watering the vegetable garden.

As she goes up and down the plots, soaking the soil until it gets dark and heavy, she's silent. They work accompanied by the sounds of the spray of water, the clipping of shears, the occasional squishing sound their shoes make in the dirt. 

Then, chore completed, she's suddenly at Reki's side, biting down loudly on a cucumber she harvested too young. Reki gasps and almost drops his shears.

Ignoring his convulsions, she asks a question as she chews. "Reki," she says, allowing the most delicate touch of a lilt to her voice. "Can you teach me how to skate?"

She finishes off the cucumber and, almost like an afterthought, adds on a "Please?"

And how can he say no to her?

\---

  
  


Nanae takes to skating like Reki took to skating, which is to say: slowly and passionately, with a great amount of joy.

Kyan’s are, historically, craftspeople and artisans, great with their hands. The home they live in was built by their grandparents, stones laid by hand to form the outer fence. Their dad is a ceramicist, shaping teapots and cups and all sorts of dishware in a nearby studio, painting glaze onto their edges. Their mom, a Kyan by nature if not by birth, makes and sells infinitely intricate wooden puzzle boxes. It was at her side that Reki learned how to carve and shape wood, and at his dad’s feet that he learned how to wield a brush; it's with his family's skills in his hands that he crafts Nanae's board.

She ends up loving it; it's small, multipurpose. A great board for beginners, especially one who isn't sure if she wants to do tricks or cruise the endless streets of their city yet. With her input, he coats the bottom with layers upon layers of summer sweet strawberries, and camouflages his little red angel in so there's a part of him always with her. 

He watches her take her first brave steps onto the board, making her wobbly way up and down the sidewalk, before all of a sudden she’s tackling corners and carving the streets.

He’s filled with an overwhelming sense of pride; skating next to his sister is joy itself. It reminds him of how he felt watching Langa learn to skate, before he surpassed Reki's plateau, but it's not tinged with the dark morass of envy.

The trouble really begins when a pack of Nanae's little friends - a gaggle of girls in braids and pigtails and one boy with hair clips in his bangs - camp out at their door one weekend, helmets and beginner boards in hand.

Nanae looks bothered when they arrive, but Reki can detect a hint of joy in the way she tries to uncurve her impulsive smile.

Reki, meanwhile, is terrified. Kids are so loud!

"-please Nanae, you're so cool! I wanna-"

"-so unfair that you have a teacher-"

"-ome on, come on, you promised us you'd share him! Let him teach us-"

"-ah, Nanae! You didn't say your older brother was cute, I can't believe you kept this from us-"

He’s standing behind his sister - he’s not using her as a shield, but he kind of is, and coughs. This gets their attention, and suddenly he has a pack of middle schoolers staring eagerly up at him. “So, you wanna learn how to skate from Big Brother Reki, huh?”

“Nanae,” the boy says. “Your brother is cute, but he’s not cool at all.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying,” she agrees, and drags Reki by the hand out into the throng.

  
  


\---

  
  


The first thing he does is dig through his shed, pulling out spare pads for everyone.

The next thing he does - to a croaking chorus of groans - is walk them through all the different parts of a skateboard while checking their own to make sure no trucks are ready to fall off, no missing bolt to lead them to immediate despair and doom.

"The only way to keep yourself safe is to know your equipment by heart," he says, gesturing to a deconstructed skateboard he's arranged on the ground. They're all squatting around it, rapt with attention. "Your board is the only thing keeping you going when you're traveling that fast! The only thing propelling you forward, keeping you from being gashed across the pavement." 

He grimaces, and the kids do too. It's maybe overkill, but he'd rather they be overprepared, rather than send them off into the sunset with no idea of the risks.

"The least you can do to respect your board and yourself is to know what everything does."

No skating happens that first day, but everyone leaves with their own wrench and an invitation to stop by early the next morning. Reki takes the evening to stock up on cute band aids and watermelon. 

The next day, and the weekend after that, and then the evenings, and sometimes in the morning when Nanae can convince a friend or two to wake up way earlier than they need to and dog pile Reki awake, is spent teaching them all how to skate.

Reki starts small - teaching them how to fall correctly, how to balance, how to stop. The basic ways to protect the body when it launches through space.

They spend ages cruising around the flattest, quietest stretches of roads Reki can find. Sometimes it’s the whole pack of them, and they’re a rowdy, raucous mess - more than enough tweenage energy to make up for Nanae. Sometimes it’s just him, Nanae, and Asahi, the snarky boy with the hair clips, and Reki makes up for their energy too.

He learns a lot of the most pressing junior high gossip - the secret crushes, the witnessed confessions, whatever weirdness is going on between the tennis and basketball clubs.

They talk about the teachers too - his old homeroom teacher, Mrs. Yamashita, has taken up salsa dancing in her spare time and launched a club. Nanae’s friend, Yuka - who always wears her long, brown hair in a strict french braid hanging down her back, and triple checks that her shoelaces are tied before she starts skating - keeps getting approached about joining, and is running low on ways to refuse.

“Tell her you’ve joined a street gang,” Reki suggests. “If you mention that I’m leading it, maybe she’ll remember me and back off.”

Yuka actually considers this for a few moments, taking a break from trying to nail an ollie, before Hatsuko - who always steals clips from Asahi to pin back the bangs of her short hair - bounds off her board next to her, joyous, loud laughs filling the alley. “Why would they think you’re a gang member?” She asks. “You’re so…” and she waves her fingers at him.

Looking between Hatsuko’s hands and Reki’s smiling face, wrapped up in a bright yellow hoodie despite the afternoon heat, Yuka nods, as if it makes perfect sense. “You’re not really intimidating,” she agrees.

Reki throws a hand over his heart, makes exaggerated crying sounds as he goes to his knees, wounded. “Cut through the heart! Betrayed, by the kin of my ki-” Hatsuko kicks him, gently, in the gut. “Ow!”

The two girls are looking down at him now, refusing to let him go without answering. _It’s weird_ , he thinks, to feel trapped by two kids, as if they care about what he’s going to say. “I think all the junior high teachers think I’m a delinquent. I’d skip class to skate sometimes - _not a good example to follow!_ \- and, well.” He shrugs, as if to fill in the gaps surrounding his old friend, the accident, and the rumors and whispers that seemed to crowd him, like a miasma, following him from homeroom to homeroom. 

Their family doesn’t talk about it much, but he spent a whole month and a half not going to school, a counselor dropping off and picking up his homework every few days.

When he finally went back, he couldn’t hear the whispers anymore. But the silence - the loneliness - hurt more than the rumors.

Yuka and Hatsuko both shrug. “Nanae’s insta is full of pictures of you sleeping in weird places. No one believes you’re a delinquent, dude,” Hatsuko says.

_Dude,_ Yuka mouths.

Reki beams.

\---

  
  


Sometime later, he trusts them enough to bring them to a skatepark. The skatepark - the one he taught Langa at, the one he and his friend spent hours at. Every inch of that place is full of memories.

_Back to basics,_ he thinks to himself. Thinks of Cherry and how his scar has slowly been fading, and how he seems to smile more freely and openly than before.

Before he can bring them, though, he meets the parents of the kids he’s been teaching. Hatsuko’s weirdly severe mom and dad, both lawyers; Yuka’s incredibly chill uncle who runs a snack shop Reki’s stopped at many times; Asahi’s welcoming mom, who makes him stay for a long and elaborate dinner and doesn’t let him leave without engulfing him in an extended hug and a soft, whispered thanks; and finally Sara-Call-Me-Spike’s quiet, mousy father, who doesn’t really know what to do with the burst of energy Reki brings to any given room. 

He sits with Spike’s dad for a while, showing him safety videos and clips of tricks they can easily learn at the park, before the older man sighs. “I don’t often understand my daughter,” he says, gesturing toward a wall of pictures that show a blonde girl dying her hair progressively darker and darker, until it’s reached the mix of black and green it currently is, “but I want her to love whatever it is she’s doing. So thank you, for helping her be happy.”

And isn’t it a funny thing, huh? Loving what you do? Being happy?

  
  


\---

  
  


In class, that next day, Reki’s grin stretches across infinity. Langa can’t stop staring. And even though Reki is cold, wrapped in his sweatshirt and school jacket, he can’t stop smiling.

“Hey, Reki,” Langa asks. When Reki turns to him, Langa’s pale face flushes, his eyes go wide, and he also goes silent.

“Hm? Do you need a pencil or something?” Reki asks, concerned, forgetting for a moment their split history. It’s hard to feel so mournful about something when he’s so fueled with joy, about to share his happiness with his sister and her friends.

Langa shakes his head, but Reki drops a pencil on his desk anyway. He looks away when Langa cradles it in his long, elegant fingers, but he catches glimpses in the window anyway.

Clouds dot the sky, blotting out the sun; it might rain later, but the air is thick with heat. He wonders, for a moment, if Langa feels warm in this weather, or if his flame burns cold.

Maybe one day he’ll be able to ask again. 

  
  


\---

  
  


Reki knows almost all the regulars at _Dope Sketch._ He knows their names, their preferences. The younger ones proudly demonstrate their progress to him, waiting for his feedback - tips, and wide-eyed honest praise. The older ones show him videos of tricks, and he breaks them down piece by piece, until they have a whole map guiding them to where they want to be. The oldest customers talk to him about skating way back when they were younger, how the scene has changed and how it’s stayed the same, how cool the new kids on the scene are, and _hey did you see what Tony Hawk just did?_

There’s one regular he can’t quite grasp, though, and it’s frustrating. He comes in on random weekday evenings, never the same one twice - Reki even checks with Langa, sometimes, to see if he comes in when they have different shifts. The man has dark hair and sad, downcast eyes, a mole dotted just under his right one. He wears nondescript tee shirts, nondescript shoes, and if pressed, Reki couldn’t even describe what his voice sounds like. 

He always pays in cash, so Reki can’t catch the name on a card, and he always buys a cheap, basic set of wheels that they always have in stock, so he never has to special order anything for him. He never really makes conversation, accepting Reki’s greetings with a nod.

It’s _beyond_ frustrating; there’s never been a nut Reki couldn’t crack, and there’s something about the way the man moves - how he walks, his gait, his reflexes, how quickly he seems to go through wheels, that tells Reki he must be an incredible skater. There’s the way his eyes lingered, once, over a longboard Reki painted with the image of an empty skate bowl, and the way they seemed to actually glow with something like longing when he went to pay.

When he next comes in, after Reki’s started taking the kids - they’ve been trying and failing to come up with a name for their group - to the skatepark, Reki tries making conversation with him again.

As he’s making change for the man, he stalls at the register, pretending to fumble. “Hey, sorry, I just. You look like you’re good with kids,” Reki says, and that’s mostly true. He has soft eyes and a softer bearing. Kids would eat him alive. “I’ve been teaching some to skate; got any tips?” he asks, putting his change in the little tray and sliding it over. When he looks up, the man is meeting his eyes for the first time.

Reki hasn’t felt terror like this in a long time.

His eyes haven’t changed at all, he thinks, but there’s a wild look on his face - at turns ravenous, at turns rangy, like he’s a rabid animal lured into a corner. There’s power in his gaze, almost pinning Reki into place, and his body is stilled into submission. His breathing goes heavy, and he grabs at the counter, digs his fingers into the wood. “Don’t,” he snarls, and Reki suppresses the urge to whimper.

Then, all at once, it passes. The man mumbles a “sorry,” at Reki, then grabs his money and wheels and turns on his tail out of the store. 

Reki pretends he can’t see nail marks in the wood, and refuses to explain them to Manager Oka when he asks. 

The man comes back nine days later, buys his cheap wheels, nods at Reki’s greetings, and leaves.

\---

  
  


They make a weird crowd of regulars at the skatepark, coming by every weekend and multiple evenings. Somehow, Langa seems to notice that Reki hasn’t been going straight home after school, like he normally has. It’s in the wear and tear on his board, maybe, or the occasional cuts and bruises that have re-emerged on his skin, when he shows off a little for the kids, and fails on purpose to know they don’t have to be scared of falling.

He spends too much time in the morning staring at himself in the mirror, stretching his skin, trying to see if anything has changed there - if he looks more tired, more drained, duller, exhausted. But he can’t see anything. He looks the same.

When he says as much to Nanae, she scoffs and calls him lame.

Langa actually follows Reki to the park after class one day, even though he’s more than outgrown it and still has the higher ramps and longer grinds of S to his name. Reki throws him a lemonade and nods at him, but the full pack of kids has joined them today, and at any given moment at least one of them is sitting by Reki as he calls out tips to the rest of them, demonstrates tricks and adjusts their footing, ready to glare Langa into frozen submission if he approaches them.

It’s overkill, and it’s weird to Reki to let kids fight his battles for him, but he has to admit he’s charmed.

It’s weirder still, to look over to the corner they’ve pretty much caged Langa into, where he idly fidgets on his board, to see that he’s smiling. 

\---

  
  


They’re not all about skating, all the time. When they’re bone tired, skin rubbed red, shins bruised and battle wounds bandaged, working up the energy in the evenings to skate or walk back home, the kids talk, comfortable around Reki like he’s a wall or a pillow and not their friend’s weird, lonely older brother.

Yuka asks him for girl advice one day, and he gives her a _look,_ one that he hopes says “Do you think I know anything?” 

Hatsuko notices and immediately asks him about boys, and he can feel his cheeks warm with a flush, before giving them gender-neutral advice. Nothing he’s ever tried has worked, after all. 

It’s not always crushes, either - they’re all about style, or aesthetics, or whatever. When they find out Reki prints his own sweatshirts, they start hounding him for matching ones - so they need to have endless arguments on the design, because they have to _agree, Reki, this is a democracy._

Hatsuko keeps yelling about American grunge music and the dream of the nineties, while Asahi suggests that they should keep their icons cute and simple. Nanae’s only contribution so far has been to demand that the base of the shirt is pink - which is fine, Reki can steal a bunch from _Dope Sketch -_ and Yuka suggests that the shirt be symmetrical, at least.

Spike, meanwhile, is staring at something off in the distance, mouth gawping, like she’s seen her future all at once. Reki’s seen it on Langa’s face before, when he leaped over him on his skateboard that first day they knew each other. It’s longing, and awe, and happiness all at once. Reki wonders if he’ll ever feel something like that.

He tunes out the discussion - something about halftone patterns, but he’ll cross that bridge when they come to it - in favor of following Spike’s gaze, sitting up on his board and turning his head to look.

When he does, he makes direct eye contact with a group of classic punks, a couple of leather jackets slung over shoulders as a concession to the heat of the late afternoon. He’s certain they’re barely in their early twenties; it’s something about their bearing, the rangy look of their arms, all the time he’s spent with Shadow, watching confidence build in layers of greasepaint and leather.

They’re a riot of tight, ripped pants and combat boots - although the only one with a skateboard is wearing more sensible jeans, patched and torn, and sneakers. Gashes of color - some bursts of the same vivid green highlighting Spike’s hair, some pink, a taste of red - dot the whirlwind, and they’re all staring directly at Reki now. 

He looks at Spike, who is nervously thumbing the zipper of her dark grey hoodie - she’s got a series of patches on the back, safety pins running lengthwise up her sleeves that Reki is only a little nervous about. When he meets them after school to bring them to the skatepark, she always waits until they’re at least five blocks away from the Junior High to reach into her backpack and pull the jacket out, slipping it over her shoulders so it engulfs her like armor. 

He pulls at one of the drawstrings on his own hoodie, and catches, from the corner of his eyes, a smirk on the face of one of the punks - this one wearing a dingy grey shirt, with a band logo he’ll never recognize, her hair shaved close to the scalp and bleached almost white.

There’s a lot of power in seeing the person you want to be reflected back at you at such a young, impressionable age. To know that you’re not forging a solo path, completely alone - to feel like a part of something, that people are walking alongside you, that you’re not bearing some invisible weight only on your shoulders.

It also takes a lot of energy to do that, and Spike - soft, shy Spike, who watches foreign films with her dad on Saturday nights while they touch up her roots, almost in complete silence - needs that final push to help her see that. It’s momentum - the first time you’re on a skateboard, trying to figure out how to work up the energy to push yourself forward. Sometimes it’s easier to have someone help you, push you forward, so you know the feeling you want to grow towards.

That’s something Reki can do. He can carry her bravery for her until she’s ready.

  
  


\---

  
  


“It’s not going to hurt, right?” Reki asks, as he leans up on his elbows on the salon table.

The piercer - “Kazuo, but my friends call me Eyeball, don’t ask,” - levels an unamused stare at him from where he’s seated beside the table, laying out the equipment he’ll be using. He’s got long dark hair tied back in a ponytail, a mural of floral tattoos - and definitely a nipple piercing, Reki _gulps_ \- just barely visible through his white tee shirt, and a stampede of multicolored piercings running up his right ear. Maddeningly, there is absolutely nothing abnormal about his eyes except for how serious they are, how dark.

He leans back down, shoves his hair in his headband to reveal the full curve of his own right ear. Kazuo rubs a sanitizing pad across his lobe, and Reki can _just_ imagine the black latex against the tan of his skin, the red of his hair.

“So why are you doing this, anyway?” Kazuo asks, leaning back to grab the needle. “Trying to impress a girl?” He asks, before taking a cold look at Reki’s face. “..Or a guy?”

“No no, it’s nothing like that,” Reki says, going to lean up before he’s pinned back against the table by Kazuo’s glare. “I just thought it would look cool,” he grins out, but Kazuo still doesn’t make a move, pausing his movements around Reki’s ear. Reki exhales. “And… my sister’s friend really wants one, but she’s young and scared of needles, so I thought I’d get one to show her it’s okay!”

Kazuo laughs behind his surgical mask - okay, he _snorts_ a little bit, but Reki will count that as a win. 

There’s the whole army of his sister’s friends - the weird group of children who have pack-bonded with him - waiting for him to emerge with a small silver ball dotted into his flesh, smiling like he normally does. They’ve got Kazuo’s friends - the punks from the skatepark, who were really nice and welcoming even though Reki looked like an absolute fool introducing himself and Spike, not at all helped by Nanae butting in to call the pack of tweens a ‘street-gang’ and Hatsuko threatening to launch an Okinawan turf war, whatever that is - waiting with them.

He’s gotten here through an inexplicable series of circumstances, serving as the interlocutor between a group of highly motivated punk adults and impressionable school kids. When Spike shyly compliments the huge Sailor Moon patch on the back of one of their leather jackets, he prods her to show off work she’s done on her own hoodie; when the blonde one suggests that they stop taking up all this space at the skatepark, just chatting, it’s Reki who drags them to A&W as the happy medium between the Kyan family home and some weird underpass as hangout spots.

It’s tough, lonely work, but it only reminds him a little bit of the halcyon days at S.

After a few weeks of impromptu meet-ups, Asahi’s got little skull shaped clips pinned into his hair, and he sticks one on Reki’s headband too. It looks great. Reki never takes it off. Spike greets them all at the door of their Junior High, already wrapped up in her hoodie. Yuka’s experimenting with two braids, instead of one. Hatsuko has a battle cry, and Reki’s eardrums bleed. 

He gets their story out of them, piece by piece. The punks - Dagger, Q, and Sniper - have been traveling across Japan for the last year or so, renting apartments and crashing on friend’s couches to get a taste of the whole country before they settle back into their hometown in the north.

Q - the tallest one of them, pale, with an undercut and the most piercings - is quiet because they’ve never quite been able to shake their hometown dialect, and every sentence Reki wrangles out of them feels like a win, even if he says a hundred words to one of theirs. Sniper is the skateboarder, and picked her name before she learned English - “it sounded cool,” she sheepishly admits to an unamused Nanae while sipping on a rootbeer float.

She texts him one night and he comes to the apartment they’re splitting right now - which is a room in Kazuo’s apartment, he learns later - to help her buzz and bleach her hair, while Q is at a show and Dagger - long black hair, sharp bangs, canines filed into points - apologizes because he hates the scent of bleach.

He’s tired the next day at school, almost falling asleep in his math notes as a concerned Langa watches on, but it’s worth it for the way Q greets him with a pack of Hi-Chew when they return from their concert, for the laughter he shares with Sniper over pictures of her many ill-fated DIY haircuts, for the way Dagger pauses, a glint in his pale eyes, when Reki admits that Spike has wanted a piercing for a while but is pretty scared to get it done.

He thinks he may have made friends, even if they’re going to leave him eventually.

When Kazuo tells him to inhale and pokes the needle through his earlobe, chasing it with the labret, it doesn’t hurt at all. It feels a lot like being alive. 

  
  


\---

  
  


Piercings heal from the inside out.

They’re a puncture wound in the body, and what the body wants - what the flesh remembers - is for the wound to close, for the foreign object to _get out_ and leave forever.

Healing is a waiting game.

\---

  
  


Spike looks at his ear for a long while, in awe, and that weekend drags her dad down to the studio with Reki in tow. At the end of the day, she’s the proud owner of two matching lobe piercings - and a promise to switch them out to silver hoops, once they heal - and her dad has traded movie recommendations with Kazuo, who studied film in college and has the walls of the studio dotted with stills from old French movies Reki could never hope to recognize.

When they go to leave, Kazuo grabs Reki’s shoulder to stop him. He shrugs at Spike and her dad, and they wait for him outside.

“Listen,” Kazuo says, “I’m glad you have a street gang-” Reki cuts him off with a groan, shoving his face into his hands. 

“They’re my kid sister’s friends, oh my god. I’m just teaching them stuff.” Kazuo actually laughs this time, and Reki can tell from the way the edges of his eyes wrinkle above his mask.

“The kid with the skull clips threatened to punch me in the balls if I hurt you.”

Reki pauses and sighs. “I’ll talk to Asahi about violence. I don’t think he’s punched anyone before.” _Although,_ he thinks.

Kazuo laughs again. “Okay, okay, street gang or not, I think you need friends your age.” Reki tries and fails to suppress a wince, and Kazuo tries and fails to not notice it. “What I mean is, my sister _also_ needs friends, is also a bit of a weirdo, and is also very kind.” 

Reki thinks that maybe Kazuo needs friends too, friends who won’t crash in his spare bed for a few weeks before moving on, friends who can stick around. “I gave her your number; she’ll reach out. You’re not allowed to try to date her,” he finishes, smug.

“Yeah, haha, I don’t think we’ll have a problem there,” Reki admits, an image coming to his mind, unbidden. A boy flying through the air, the cold chill of snow flurries, a rare taste of winter in Okinawa. Langa’s ice blue hair haloing him, matching eyes piercing directly into his own. He gulps, and Kazuo’s eyes become searching, serious again, as if they’re reading something written directly off his face. He might as well be broadcasting, and Kazuo nods, as if he knows.

“We definitely won’t have a problem,” he says. “As long as you clean your piercing regularly and don’t touch it!” He shoves a paper bag at Reki’s chest - an extra can of wound wash - and pushes him out the door. 

  
  


\---

  
  


Kazuo’s sister is named Kazuko.

**[Kazuko]** our parents had no imagination you’re NOT ALLOWED to laugh about it ugh.

And she’s definitely a weirdo, but a popular one, in a world where weird kids thrive.

**[Kazuko]** It’s called art school, Reki! Read a book.

She texts him at odd hours, when she claims to be studying or working on a piece. Her messages are frenetic, as if she’s powered by caffeine and energy drinks. She sends him pictures of her works in progress - incredibly elaborate oil paintings and digital drawings of women and Reki wonders why Kazuo even tried to threaten him about dating her.

**[Kazuko]** He’s definitely projecting - he’s the one who needs friends. 

Reki responds - not as often, but he definitely responds - with questions about what she’s studying, shares pictures of the boards he’s working on, occasional complaints about how itchy his piercing is. She gives him an impromptu critique of one of his board designs in a series of increasingly passionate voice messages, and apologizes immediately after. “It’s like a muscle,” she says. “A reflex.”

Texting is a muscle he hasn’t worked out in a while. It comes back to him eventually.

**[Reki]** It’s okay! What do you think of this? [see img. attached]

  
  


\---

  
  


Eventually the body starts to accept that the piercing is in it for the long haul, and instead of trying to force it out, it rearranges the home to welcome it.

This is a long process, a trying time, and moving the piercing can easily upset the healing site, setting your work back weeks and leading to an increased risk of infection. Keep the site clean, without aggravating it.

Healing is an active process.

\---

  
  


Kazuko invites him to an art student party after her exams.

**[Kazuko]** they told us to invite cool people and you’re the only cool person I know. it’ll be awesome. we’ll find you a cute girl or boy or something, you’ll have a good time.

**[Reki]** Or something, haha! I’ll be there.

The party is at some kind of abandoned construction site in the outskirts of a suburb; a planned community that went nowhere. The roads are half paved, so Reki can skate easily to the site. There’s a half poured foundation, cement structures that look like they could be sculptures but really could be anything, a couple of big drums with fire burning in the center. It’s very... “It’s super pretentious, but what can you do?” Kazuko says, throwing him a grape soda. 

“If there weren’t people here right now I could skate all over it,” Reki says. For hours, probably, grinding on the concrete blocks and abandoned rails, riding the half rotted ramps until they give way, make it a place to be loved and used instead of abandoned and wasted. Kazuko looks at him with the same intense eyes her brother has, dark and inky in the scant firelight. Above the crackling Reki can hear someone strum a guitar; Kazuko notices and groans.

“Pretentious, like I said. Come on, let me show you my friends.” She grabs his wrist, casually and thoughtlessly, also like Kazuo, and drags him to a circle near one of the drums. Reki’s grateful he didn’t open his soda already, barely able to hang on to the drink and his board while she pulls him along. Her asymmetric bob - starting over one ear, revealing a long line of piercings, curving across and down the back of her head, ending below her chin - does not move at all.

Her friends are fine - enjoyable to talk to, even, but he knows he won’t see them again after tonight. But he’s fine being part of something that isn’t dangerous - something normal teenagers do, where there’s no real risk of injury, no life or death stakes, no prodigies. They’re welcoming, even if sometimes they joke about things he doesn’t understand - he’s used to being out of the loop, or the butt of a secret joke, so it’s fine. He talks about skating a little, compliments a girl on the shirt she designed and lets a boy scribble symbols on his arm with a pen. 

In the distance, he can hear the white noise of conversations, feel the thumping of bass below his feet from a makeshift DJ - an audio engineering student who already has a record deal, apparently - and the crackling hum of the fire. It keeps him warm, but he keeps his hoodie on, sleeves rolled up a bit as a concession to the heat.

And then, suddenly, he feels a burst of cold bloom on the side of his head, spread down the back of his neck, blossom over his back and encase him in chill. When he breathes in, the air feels cold and dry, like he’s on top of a winter mountain peak instead of a nameless suburb in an Okinawa summer.

Cutting through the sound is one crystal call - “Reki? Reki!” - and the circle of Kazuko’s friends turn before he does. _It must be weird_ , he thinks, far away from them already. _That I’m a stranger here, but someone recognizes me._

Slowly, he turns his head, though winter has overtaken his body. The flakes of ash crumble into snow, the smoke is the bitter, frozen bite of a cold morning, and the fire disappears entirely, and all he can see is - 

“Langa,” he whispers. 

  
  


\---

  
  


They end up in a corner of the compound, where someone once built up a wall - the outer edges of a home, maybe, for all it’s crumbling now - a shield from the rest of the party, their own private world. 

It’s just him and Langa again - they haven’t been alone like this, together, adrift in a new, exciting sea, in a very long time. At school, at work, in the skatepark, it’s been easy to avoid Langa, reject their once shared intimacy, the memory of their making.

But something about a friendship like theirs cuts right into you and never leaves; if they never spoke again, Reki thinks they would have matching scars, cut into the palms of their hands, of their broken promises. But there’s a potential for something better.

“Reki,” Langa whispers, reverent like a prayer, like they hadn’t seen each other in class that morning, like Reki hadn’t left the classroom that afternoon without talking to Langa again, like he hadn’t dropped a red bean bun at his desk in the morning before he came in, still warm. 

Reki feels like a stranger in his own skin for the first time in a while, his heart beating patterns he doesn’t recognize. He once carried Spike’s bravery for her - who can carry his?

“Reki!” Langa says, louder, wrapping his arms around Reki in a proprietary grip, as if he fears Reki might disappear again; and honestly, it’s risky, since right now he’s far, far away.

But then Langa shifts, his shoulder accidentally knocking against his pierced ear. Reki winces but the pain grounds him, and he exhales the breath he’s no longer holding.

“How did you get here?” Reki asks. 

“Oh,” Langa blinks, pulling back from him a little. Reki thinks this isn’t the question Langa thought he might ask. “Um, someone from S. You?”

Reki opens his mouth to respond, but nothing comes out. The truth is the truth, but telling Langa a friend invited him risks opening a lot of doors he’s trying to keep closed. “It’s… a long story,” he tries, and Langa nods. A lot has happened in the months between them - a lot of long stories.

Langa’s still touching him, running his hands up and down Reki’s arms like he can barely believe he’s here, examining the ink on his forearm, the skull pin on Reki’s headband, glinting in the moonlight, the - 

“Reki,” Langa gasps. “Your ear.” Reki nods, laughs nervously, but he knows Langa won’t comment on it; their friendship is like a muscle.

Suddenly Langa is all questions, moving to examine it, close enough that Reki can feel his warm exhales of breath on his neck. He doesn’t feel cold anymore, but Langa’s fingers are where they gently anchor his head so he can examine the small metal ball shining on his ear lobe. “So cool,” he murmurs. “When did you..? Did it hurt? Can I touch it?” 

Reki steps away from him abruptly, already mourning the loss of Langa’s fingers. When he risks a glance at him, he can see the sadness flow into his eyes so quickly. That’s always been the difference between them - one of many, Reki hedges. Langa wears his heart on his sleeve, but could never tell you how he’s feeling. Reki knows exactly how he feels, all the time, but would never let you see it. 

This is why Reki couldn’t look at him when he yelled at him in the rain - he knew that one look at Langa’s honest, devastated face would leave him yearning to reach out, smooth over the wounds, fix everything he’d ever done wrong. It’s a power Langa doesn’t know he holds over Reki, and it’s why Reki can’t bring himself to look too closely at him in class, why he drops off snacks for him in the morning before he comes in, even though they both know the anonymity is a farce. 

If Reki could - if he knew that he wouldn't set back the healing process - he'd let Langa touch his piercing, caress the outer shell of his ear, pepper it with whispers and cold touches. He told Joe once that he was selfish; he still has to be, if only to protect himself.

He gives Langa the next best thing - an explanation. "It's technically a wound, Langa," he says. "And it's still pretty fresh. It needs time to heal." He watched Langa nod, accept it, and then - wildly - he can see the gears, like clockwork, turn inside Langa's head.

"Reki," he starts. He's clenching his fists tight like he wants to be clutching something - not like he's preparing to throw a punch. "Have we… had time?" He asks.

Reki can fill in the blanks. He shakes his head, and does the hardest thing he's ever done - he meets him halfway. "Give me a bit more time," he says. "A bit more time and we will." _I'll be good for you,_ Reki thinks. _I'll be whole for you. I'll have a place for you._

There's so much Reki isn't ready to say, but despite all the space still between them - the silences, the secrets - when Langa beams, it's as bright as the sun.

Maybe, Reki Kyan isn’t so fucked after all.


	2. But I keep on coming back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which more ghosts make their appearance, we all collectively ignore weird biblical metaphors, lots of talk of mirrors for some reason, and Reki finally opens his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much and all my love to everyone who has supported this story!
> 
> To make this AU function, there's a lot of headcanon I have regarding all of the characters, what they've been doing since Reki left S and how that whole wedding tournament thing went down.
> 
> The relevant parts for this chapter are:  
> 1\. Feral Tadashi has rights;  
> 2\. Adam doesn't go to jail but;  
> 3\. Sometimes there are other ways to get captured.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!
> 
> CW: More descriptions of piercing, food mentions.

_Look up_

_Do you see the sunlight?_

_Look up_

_There's flowers in your hair_

_Hold on_

_'Cause somebody loves you_

_You know trouble's always gonna be there_

_Don't lеt it bring you to your knees_

_Look up_

_-Joy Oladokun, look up_

When Shadow finally comes by the shop, he has a small bouquet of flowers in his arms.

"A gift for your manager," he says tonelessly. "We're promoting good will and companionship throughout the neighborhood businesses."

Reki takes the bouquet and narrows his eyes. "What the hell happened to you?" he asks.

"Who gives you any right to ask that, you punk?!" Shadow roars, and then wincing, coughs. He sighs when Reki doesn't flinch, or make a move to do anything but stand there, giggling at him. "You used to be intimidated by me, kid. What happened?"

"Kid?" Reki laughs. "Didn't know you were such an old man now, Hi~ro~mi!" 

Shadow makes a move to respond, but his eyes catch on the ball in Reki's ear. "I really hope you did that safely," he growls. "Sewing needles aren't sterile."

"Thanks for caring, dad!" Shadow groans, but there's not a single hint of malice, just the calm acceptance of some friendly ribbing. He takes a look around the store and seems to notice the same things Reki does - the absence of Oka or Langa, the growing wall of custom decks Reki's designed, the selection of in-line skates - and his posture relaxes, shoulders going slack. 

"S hasn't been the same, you know. Miya and Langa… they're both different without you," Shadow admits, honest in a way Reki can't remember him being. 

He's not sure what Shadow responds to best; the man has always been an enigma to him. There's an infinite capacity for caring - and that's something Reki knows well - but then there's the strength he seems to gain from the role he plays, the Antihero of S. Reki isn't like that; can't divide himself into two parts, so that one can power the other. He's an all or nothing kinda guy, so that's what he says.

"I miss you all, too," he finds himself saying, instead, and cringes. But when he looks at Shadow, he can see the beginnings of a small crack on the veneer of artifice. "It's been hard," he admits. "But something had to change, for me, to be happy. And I'm working on it. And I think I'll be better when I get there." 

That's a lot of words he didn't know he'd say; a lot of thoughts he didn't think he had. His body and mind can still surprise him. 

Shadow nods. "I haven't been skating much because I got this," he says, pointing to a new industrial in his ear. "It's really new, and I don't want to fu- mess it up while skating." Reki smiles, a little raw. "But I know it'll always be there for me, when I'm ready to get back."

_He gets it,_ Reki thinks, and then he looks down at the bouquet cradled in his hands.

"Um, Shadow? I don't think Manager Oka has a vase."

Predictably, Shadow explodes.

He returns, an hour later, with a vase. There’s an orange ribbon wrapped around it. 

  
  


\---

  
  


Langa’s still staring at him in class. Not as often and definitely not as openly. When Reki drops a bottle of lemonade or a snack off on his desk in the morning, he just smiles and slides it into his bag for later, or chugs it immediately. 

He’s stopped passing by Reki’s house late at night, checking to see if he’s maybe slipped out to head to S - this, Reki knows, because he’s still awake at those hours, years of attending S still baked into his bad habits, and had grown uncomfortably used to the gentle hum of the scooter when it stalls outside his window. He’s pleased with its absence and with the quiet. It doesn’t make him sleep any better, mind constantly racing with thoughts and colors and ideas, but it cheers him to know he’s eased a little of Langa’s worry and gained a little of his trust. 

Langa’s grades are slowly creeping back up, too, but this Reki also only knows under duress. Their teacher pulled him aside at the beginning of lunch, again, only this time instead of concern, his voice broadcasts relief. “Thank you,” he says, “for fixing whatever was going on.”

“But I didn’t do anything,” Reki replies, honest in his confusion.

Their teacher shrugs. “Clearly you did enough.” Then he taps the lobe of his ear, enough so that the sleeves of his shirt ride up a little bit more than usual to reveal the beginnings of a swirl of tattoos. “I’m letting this slide, by the way.”

He partners them together on a project, and their classmates - who have been silent witnesses, in Reki’s mind, to whatever cold war has been going on in their friendship for months - look on in abject fear. He has no idea what they’ve said to Langa. 

They’re all pleasantly surprised when there’s no explosion, no sadness. For Reki and Langa, there are phantom shadows of their months of silence, but there’s also the memory of working together ingrained in their bodies, overwhelmingly more powerful than their adolescent fears and worries. 

They’re all exhausted by the time the presentation rolls around, and Reki and Langa present a brightly colored powerpoint about dinosaurs for their history project.

“It’s natural history!” Reki says, cheerfully.

Langa nods, while their teacher headdesks.

“Do you think we can get them to fight again?” Izumi whispers to her neighbor.

“I sure hope so,” Kenzo mutters in response.

  
  


\---

  
  


Reki’s alone at the shop when Joe and Cherry walk in, together.

Cherry’s a regular during Reki’s shifts, but he’s only seen Joe the one time he burst into a spectacular stream of tears. He beams at the both of them, and Joe manages a tentative smile in return.

“So, Reki,” Joe starts, fitting his fingers into the indents in the wood of the counter. They never buffed out, so Oka had Reki sand and oil the wood, until that customer’s outburst became part of the shop itself. Not a remnant of the past we can change, but a mistake we live with. “What’s new with you?” 

Reki rubs against the scabs on his right arm, a remnant of road rash from when Hatsuko bailed spectacularly from her board, falling directly into Reki and sending them on an irresistible arc to the sidewalk. She laughed while spraying his arm with disinfectant, when he cringed at the sting. “Same old, same old,” he says, and goes to tap Joe in the center of his chest, gauze wrapped around his closed fist. A love tap, one that Joe returns.

From the back of the shop where he’s pretending to browse the magazines, Cherry scoffs. “You look different now, Reki. Anyone can tell. More alive.” Reki laughs.

“Oh yeah? Well then, how goes figuring out what you love?” Reki expects Cherry to blush, blood filling his face pink like his hair.

He didn’t expect for the apples of Joe’s cheeks to color as well, his eyes growing soft and fond as he almost melts against the counter.

Joe definitely didn’t expect that either - his expression shifts to shocked and he rubs his head bashfully. Cherry sighs, and Reki smiles at them.

“That’s our cue to leave, now, I guess,” Cherry announces, grabs Joe’s arm and steers him toward the door.

"See you around Reki, you know where to find us!” Joe calls.

Just as the door is about to swing shut, Reki calls back. “I’m glad being selfish worked out for you!” 

And he laughs as Joe stumbles against Cherry, pressing deeper into his side.

  
  


\---

  
  


Another day at the shop, another new shipment to break down, another delivery for Langa to make, another ghost from Reki’s past to emerge from the fog.

It’s a normal day, all things considered. He went skating in the morning with his sister to pick up fresh bean paste for dessert that night, and Oka’s been a little softer on them today, leaving a shorter list of tasks to do while he brings his fox to a vet outside of town. The sky is clear and bright - perfect skating weather - and they’ve had fewer customers than normal, skaters taking advantage of the day. 

He’s idly texting Kazuko - really, he’s letting her live blog an art film about reflections or alternate universes or something while he occasionally responds - when the door chimes. He straightens up and welcomes the customer who stands in the doorframe, haloed by the sun.

The man cuts an imposing figure, carries himself with an air of learned importance despite his casual clothes - a tank top and jeans which reveal strong shoulders, lean muscle, and a narrow waist. His blue hair is brushed forward into his forehead, shadowing his eyes, and there's something about him that seems almost familiar.

Although, given his years at S, almost every skater seems almost familiar.

Walking in silently, with cat-like grace, the man turns to browse the selection of wheels and equipment they have, but stops in front of the display of board art, the work Reki's been creating for the shop when he can't sleep, mind spinning.

He lingers in front of one he based off a Greek story he read years ago and returns to every so often, about a Minotaur, doomed by birth to be trapped in a maze, to know nothing of love, to kill or be killed. There's the labyrinth, cut from stone, painted in dark grey on the board; in the center, the face and horns of the bull man, visage sad and fierce all at once.

The man traces the paths of the maze with elegant fingers, and soon learns what Reki knows - there is no way into the heart of it and no way out either, the avenues all leading to dead ends. No escape from an eternal prison, but protection against unknown intruders, incomprehensible risk.

When he realizes he cannot make it to the center, the man's jaw tightens, mouth twisted into a harsh curve of frustration, and suddenly Reki gasps, flooded with recognition.

Adam turns to him then, watches the way his expression melts from fear to fury to steely hospitality, and smiles. "I'm not apologizing," is what curls out of his mouth. 

"I wasn't asking for one," Reki replies. He’s alone in the shop, and while months ago he'd be quaking in his Vans, ready to transform his flight into fight, emboldened by righteous indignation, right now he pulls out his phone and replies to Kazuko.

**[Reki]** why is the whole movie filmed through a mirror, again?

Adam cants his head to the side, Reki's newfound boredom a novelty.

"Isn't that rude behavior for a customer?" Adam asks, brushing his bangs from his face so Reki can see his narrow, crimson eyes. 

Reki shrugs. "I mean, are you going to buy anything?"

They stare each other down for a moment - Adam meeting his eyes not like an equal, not like an enemy, but like a dog, grown-up now, meeting a littermate, each wondering at the adult shape of the other.

Eventually Adam caves. "This board," he starts. He looks at it again, something breaking in his eyes. "Why is there no way in?"

"There's no way out, either," Reki responds. He pauses for a moment, wondering if he should go on. Adam's eyebrows furrow together, confused. "Sometimes… it's safest to be locked away, where no one can reach you to hurt you."

Adam goes completely still, and for a long moment Reki wonders if he, too, will cry in _Dope Sketch._

But then all at once he releases, his whole body a tight coil of tension, a spinning top with long arms. He reaches to the equipment display and grabs the cheapest pack of wheels - knowing, somehow, exactly where they'd be - and then deftly unhooks the board from the display, before turning on the ball of his foot and dropping both off on the counter.

"I'm a customer now; will you be nice to me?" He smiles, fluttering his eyes and leaning over the counter.

Reki sighs, and catches a glimpse of Kazuko's responses in his phone.

**[Kazuko]** everything is a reflection, so the reality is always falsified despite it already being a false reproduction vis a vis being filmed

**[Kazuko]** but because both halves of the reflection are visible at once, we will never know what the original reality was

**[Kazuko]** it is so pretentious UGH

"I don't think you want me to be nice to you," Reki admits. "But I'll do my best."

Adam rears back, and his fingers connect directly to the divots in the wood. He looks down, and Reki does too. His hands seem to fit perfectly in the ridges, however faint they remain, as though they were set down exactly for this moment. Reki wonders about it, wonders if he can almost recognize the shirt Adam is wearing, wonders for the first time what happened at Crazy Rock after he left.

Reki scans the wheels, looks between Adam and the board, who is curling his fingers against the divots like he’s grasping for something else.

“Consider this a gift,” Reki says, passing the board over, charging him only for the wheels. 

He doesn’t reach for the board, so Reki places it on the counter.

“This isn’t a trap,” he says. “I'm not flashy or smart enough for that. I just think that you might make something beautiful with this, and it’s better for the board to live on someone's feet than on a wall.”

Adam looks down at the board, pulls out yen to pay. “Sometimes beautiful things are meant to be seen.”

Reki nods. “Yes,” he says. “But sometimes they're meant to be used.” _To be loved._ He takes the coins, hands him the money. Is it weird that Adam, of all people, pays in cash and not a card? Maybe, but he doesn’t want it to occupy his thoughts more than he already has.

He pockets the wheels, holds the board in his hands like he’s testing the balance. “This is fine work.”

“Thanks!” Reki smiles. Skating is an act of creation, yes, but to take something from wood to the road with his bare hands is another kind of creation. This is a board he designed, he built, and Adam’s going to make something with it. 

Adam looks at him, like he wasn’t expecting it. “You did this?” he asks, and when Reki nods he hums. I appreciate it,” he grits out from between his teeth. Adam is a taker - he reaches out for what he wants and grabs it, at all possible costs. Reki once thought he could take, but in his heart he’s a giver; of knowledge, of training, of his time, of his love. He wonders, bizarrely, what Adam would be like younger - before something walled him into the center of a labyrinth, closed off from the world.

A Minotaur isn’t dangerous by nature, or by design - only by the way he is shaped and formed by the people around him. Given weapons, Adam became one. Given beauty, who knows what he will create. 

Reki is remaking the world around him. He wonders if Adam will create his own escape.

He hoists the longboard under his arm, brushes his hair back into his eyes. “Reki,” he says, when he’s shadowed up against the door again, his broad shoulders and thin waist once again haloed by the sun. “I don’t know how to thank you, so I won’t.”

“That’s okay,” Reki says. “I don’t know how to forgive you, so I won’t.”

He hopes he doesn’t see him again.

  
  


\---

  
  


Of course it's that day, when Reki is least prepared, most ill at ease, that he runs into Miya. He’s at a grocery store, doing last minute errands for his mom. His basket is full of food - meat and vegetables for dinner - and a package of lemonade. When he turns the corner into the candy aisle, trying to figure out whether or not Nanae will appreciate a surprise gift of her favorite chocolate, he stops still at the figure of Miya, wrapped in his green hoodie, standing at the end of the aisle.

He’s got a pack of Apollo in his hand, and he’s looking between that and the Hi-Chew, eyes wild with indecision. Reki comes right up to him, and Miya doesn’t notice until he pokes his cheek with his free hand. “Hey squirt,” he says. “Long time.”

Miya looks at him, shocked, like he didn’t expect anyone to recognize him or see him here. “Hi Reki,” he replies, and Reki frowns.

“Reki? Not Mr. Slime?” He teases, but instead of smiling, Miya looks fraught, frozen between the snacks, eyes incredibly still in his face like any movement will trigger tears. He can see his face pull tighter, like he’s trying to refrain from breaking down.

Reki drops to his knees, places the basket to his side, and puts a warm hand on Miya’s shoulder. “Hey, Mi-” is all he gets out before Miya’s fist clenches even tighter around the candy in his hand, while his other hand grabs at Reki’s hoodie and lets him pull the younger teen into an embrace.

They stand like that for a few minutes, Miya tucked into the curve of Reki’s arm while Reki smiles apologetically at strangers who try to turn down the aisle, before finally Miya stops and pulls back. “Sorry,” he says, and Reki pats his cheeks.

“Listen, don’t worry about it,” he says, standing up. 

Something about this - being coddled, or cared for - makes Miya harden, stiffen his shoulders and steel his gaze. “You saw nothing,” Miya hisses, but Reki - with a lifetime of practice handling Nanae and her friends - grabs his shoulder, drops the Apollo in his basket and the Hi-Chew (mango, he notes) as well for good measure.

“Why don’t you come over for dinner?” Reki asks, guiding Miya down the aisles to grab an extra bottle of his preferred sports drink and a few odds and ends. “My family won’t mind.” 

Miya narrows his eyes. “Why do I get the sense you’re not asking?”

Reki grins. “You’re right,” he says. “I’m not.”

They walk over, Miya having left his skateboard at home as well. It’s weird, walking. It’s different from skating in the obvious ways, yes, but it’s also different because skating is an act of transgression. The world isn’t built for skaters; they create the world anew, transforming the environment into something that suits them.

When they get to Reki’s house, get past the introductions, let Reki have a laugh at Miya’s shock at the size and energy of his family, he drops the groceries off in the kitchen and drags Miya out to the backyard to where the vegetable garden is and they’re framed by the fragrant blooms of hibiscus.

“Miya,” Reki says. "I owe you more than an apology," he says.

When water is supercooled, it is brought from a liquid liquid state down to a temperature below freezing. At this point, most water would turn to ice, but with supercooling it retains its liquid state. The water gives the illusion of malleability, being able to form to any shape or container or circumstance, but a single touch of a finger to that liquid can burn you cold and give the water the push it needs to crystallize, immediately, into ice. 

The molecules lock into order from chaos.

Which is to say: Reki is the poor fool to freeze alongside. 

Miya - who wields his well-earned confidence like a shield against the jealousies and oddities of other teenagers; who curved towards Reki like a sunflower loves his sun at the slightest touch of affection, freely given; who has spent the last months of Reki’s eclipse waiting for the moon to cease blocking his path - freezes into order.

And Miya - who has longed for warmth but settled for the corona, the frozen half-light only visible until the sun’s return - feels everything he’s ever felt come to the forefront of his body and mind all at once. 

It’s all Reki can do to wrap Miya in his arms, cradle his head in the shoulder of his hoodie while he cries, soaks warm tears into the fabric that Reki can feel like a brand.

Reki will never forget this. The evidence of his failure. Miya’s life made cold by the power of his own ego. An apology is not enough for Miya - for a betrayal of this caliber, from a friend who promised to stand by him and protect him and could not be brave enough to stick around, who left him to suffer in the crucible of Crazy Rock alone - repentance must be a daily practice of friendship; absolution only acceptable in death.

It is possible that Reki Kyan, who knows every way the body can break, but gets on a skateboard and defies gravity _anyway,_ is a catastrophizer. Who knew?

Hours seem to pass. In reality it’s minutes of crying, emotional release, occasionally marked by a stronger wind or a Kyan poking their head through the doors to their backyard to see if the duo are ready to return yet. Eventually the waves of Miya’s sadness, frustration, despair slow and cease entirely.

When Miya lifts his head back up, his eyes are red, the skin below raw. Reki uses the sleeves of his sweatshirt to gently pat them dry. “Feel better?” He asks, willing his own voice not to crack.

Miya glares a little, but softens like chalk when he sees Reki’s face. Reki can’t imagine he can see - the evidence of his distress, the truth of his failure? 

“I’m so sorry,” Reki says suddenly. “I shouldn’t have left you behind like that. I shouldn’t have left you out of the loop; none of what happened was your fault at all and I-”

“Ergh,” Miya interjects. “Feelings. Gross.” Reki squints at him.

“You _just_ cried all over me,” Reki says.

Miya shrugs. “There’s no evidence.” When Reki gestures at the wet spot on his shoulder, Miya snorts. “Can’t believe you sprayed water all over yourself.”

When Reki sputters, Miya laughs - honest, bright, and free.

“Fine then,” Reki grumbles. “You didn’t have feelings, I won’t have feelings at you. But hypothetically, if one of us _did_ have feelings, they would feel very sorry for everything they’ve done, and want to be there for you in the future.”

For a moment, Miya looks at him, searching. Reki is struck with the notion, as he often is, that Miya occasionally possesses wisdom beyond his years. A wisdom he shouldn’t be able to access. It comes through in his eyes, the way they harden and transform when faced with any compassion, they way he is cool and collected against a mischievous center.

It’s a face - and a feeling - Reki knows well, one that once stared back at him from a mirror in a hospital bathroom.

“If the hero were at the reconciliation stage,” Miya starts. “He would say that he accepts your apology, but would also say that he was never alone.” He looks sideways, away from Reki and towards the plot of vegetables, currently bare of the harvest. “This is the level where the whole group comes back together, after some of us defeated the disc-one final boss. There’s still a campaign and a battle to come.” He clears his throat, and Reki chokes back something as he goes for a high five.

“Alright nerd,” Reki says, rising. “That’s enough feelings for one day. Let’s go in and eat.”

“Do I have to?” Miya groans.

Reki cackles. “Absolutely you do,” he says. “I think my mom already wants to adopt you.” Pulling aside the sliding door, he turns to Miya. “Say. If I’m a member of your party, does that mean I’m no longer a slime?” 

Miya smiles and doesn’t respond, ducking under Reki’s shoulder to bolt into the house.

“Hey!” He calls after him. “Are you serious? I’m still a slime?” He’s laughing through the chase.

Shortly thereafter, it is to Miya’s great discomfort that he realizes the whole gaggle of Nanae’s friends is also at dinner that night. They wax poetic about Reki in exaggeration and hyperbole until Yuka, of all of them, breaks his poker face by complimenting Reki’s ability to carry everyone’s drinks, snacks, while texting one handed on his skateboard. 

That’s when Miya laughs, and the rest of them laugh, and Reki smiles, and he realizes - the full house of his family surrounding him, one of his youngest sisters resting in his lap - that he’s never seen Miya hang out with teens his own age before.

It makes Reki feel warm, until Miya calls him a slime in front of the rest of them.

He catches Hatsuko and Asahi look at one another, mouthing words under their breath, before erupting at the same time. “Slime Squad!” they cheer.

“That’ll be our name,” Asahi says.

“The name of our street gang!” Hatsuko says, grinning at Miya. “You’re an honorary member, since you named us.”

Yuka pulls at Miya’s sleeve. “We are not a street gang,” she says. “But can you skate?”

And that’s when Miya smiles his sly, cat-like grin, until even Nanae is looking at him, alarmed. “Can I skate?” he says.

Reki is suddenly struck dumb with the realization that he has perhaps made a great and terrible mistake. 

  
  


\---

  
  


Miya and the rest of the Slime Squad take to each other like a house on fire. 

Reki is worried that they’re going to actually form a street gang. 

  
  


\---

  
  


**[Kazuo]** Come by the shop; I’ve got something I think you might like.

Reki skates to the piercing studio one warm afternoon, after class, waving an absentminded goodbye to Langa. 

The ball in his ear has healed over, the memory of the pain long since past. He’d forget about it, honestly, if it weren’t for the way Langa sometime’s is distracted during class by the flash of metal below the curve of his ear.

When he opens the door to a faint tinkling of bells, he hears laughter that he vaguely recognizes. Kazuo, sitting behind the glass counter displaying an array of jewelry, greets him.

“Reki!” He says, smiling. “Glad you could stop by!”

Reki waves at him too, and - standing in the back of the small room, light jacket folded over one of his arms, Spike’s dad waves back. “Hi Kazuo!” 

“Take a look at this,” Kazuo says, waving him over to the counter. He swipes on surgical gloves and reaches down to pull out a platter. “And I told you, call me Eyeball.”

Reki gulps. There’s no way he could possibly do that. “Um, hello Eyeball?” he tries, and recoils at the way it feels in his mouth. Kazuo laughs.

“Perfect,” he says. “Now look, I know you’re all healed, so I thought you might want something new.” He holds out a small stud piercing, a crescent moon, made of white opal that glows blue in the ambient light of the studio; he can tell it would shine like ice in the sun. “A little word of advice, the next time you hang out with my sister,” he says. “She has eyes everywhere.”

“Kazuko is a menace,” Reki replies. “She’d call this pretentious.”

Kazuo laughs. “Nah, she’d call this cute. But this,” he says, pulling out another stud, a glittering red goldstone in the center, wavy arms radiating out from it in gold, like a dying star or a burning sun. “This is what she’d call pretentious. Are you going to let me pierce your other ear?”

Reki stares at him.

Kazuo stares back.

Spike’s dad smiles wanly from his place in the back of the room, a black and white film paused on the computer screen.

When Reki cracks his neck, Kazuo knows he’s given in, and gleefully drags him into the piercing room. Spike’s dad is already texting his daughter; they call Kazuo Eyeball for a lot of reasons, and his sister inherited at least one of those traits, after all.

This time, the needle pushing through the flesh feels like returning home.

\---

  
  


When he and Langa work together now, there is no cold chill down his spine, no constant awareness that Langa is watching. Just the muscle memory of their making, shared magazines and shared songs.

They practice tricks on the roof when they think they can sneak away, under the guise of testing out new product stock; share stories of customers they’d had the pain and pleasure of working with over the past months.

When Reki explains everything about the pack of wild, feral kids who would block Langa from talking to him at the skatepark, Langa’s eyes burn bright with an emotion he can’t parse. 

The two of them laugh at each other when they try out the new inline skate stock.

Reki is doubled over in laughter, having long since given up even attempting to balance. He’s watching Langa, who keeps trying to rise on his skates but falls down immediately, knees constantly buckling like a newborn dear.

“You’re Canadian!” Reki manages to eke out. “Aren’t you all ice skating in the womb?”

“I can’t believe you finally know I’m Canadian,” Langa replies. “And you’re using it to hurt me like this.”

Reki makes a motion like he’s shooting a baseball bat at the ground. “Weren’t you forced to play ice hockey? Shouldn’t you be an amazing skater?” 

Grasping at a railing, Langa pulls himself up to his full height; once he let’s go, the skates shake below his feet and he collapses onto his back, full body rolled out in the sun. “My parents pulled me out of hockey very quickly. I didn’t get the point of it,” he groans.

“The point?” Reki asks, crawling over to Langa and looking down at his face.

Langa blushes, turns his head to the side to stare at the wall instead of Reki. “Why does the puck need to go anywhere? Why couldn’t we just skate around? Why is there fighting?”

Charmed, overjoyed, mystified by his friend, Reki collapses into Langa’s chest, once again laughing. After a few moments, Langa joins him, and they abandon skating altogether, and the scene Oka walks into is the two boys, curled against one another, resplendent in joy.

  
  


\---

  
  


Reki has never seen Manager Oka _this happy._

It sure doesn’t mean they get any less work.

  
  


\---

  
  


It’s Reki’s mom, finally, that cracks the code for him.

They’re sitting together in the living room; Nanae’s at Spike’s house for a sleepover, and the rest of his sisters are already in bed. They both have their sketchbooks out - his mom drawing out an intricate inlay for the lid to a puzzle box she’s been working on, marking out notes on wood types and grain patterns, while Reki’s drafting designs for Nanae’s new longboard. 

He’s absently humming a song, scribbling out patterns, when he notices that her pencil has long since stopped moving. When he looks up at her, she’s staring at him fondly, a soft expression on her face, eyes almost on the brink of tears.

“Mom,” he says. “What’s wrong?” _That’s_ when she actually starts to cry, and Reki moves around the table, grabs her around the shoulder, and lets her cry into the shoulder of his hoodie.

“There’s nothing wrong,” she says, tears streaming down her face. When he looks at her, she’s smiling, of all things. “I’m just so happy. You’ve looked so much happier, recently. More carefree. Like you used to be.”

Reki’s puzzled - he looks at his own face in the mirror every day, and hasn’t noticed a change, and he says as much.

Her tears suddenly ceasing, his mom sits up onto her knees and grabs him in an embrace. “It’s not something that happens all at once, Reki,” she says. “The river runs, and the mountain doesn’t, but when the wild duck soars overhead he notices the riverbed runs deeper.”

Sometimes Reki hates that his parents met at a haiku workshop. 

She smiles at him, hugs him tighter. “That means, sometimes it’s hard to notice when we change, because it happens so slowly and gradually. It’s easier for other people to see the difference. And I’ve been so proud of you, Reki, because I’ve been seeing you grow more open, happier, and stronger these past few months. Your dad and I were worried, for a while, you were so closed off. But now,” and she pauses for a second to rub Reki’s eyes with her shirtsleeve this time, because he’s started crying and he doesn’t know how to stop. “But now, you’re accepting the love people want to give you, and it’s as big as the love you’ve given them all along.” 

When Joe cried in front of him, it was unexpected, a surprise, but a moment of bare honesty nonetheless. When Miya cried in front of him, it was a reaction to an unexpected prod, the burst of energy that would have sent any boy so carefully balanced on such a taut wire plummeting.

When Reki breaks, now, it’s like the feelings that have been chasing him all along have finally overtaken him. These past months he’s snuck peeks at them in bathroom mirrors and seen the shadows dance in a sidelong glance. They’re what have been propelling him forward, letting him glide through Okinawa’s streets, defy gravity through the air, create - and, by creating, send his love back out in the world. 

It’s the way Nanae calls his name when he skates behind her, braids flying in the wind she creates; how Spike wears her hoodie like a royal cloak and not protective armor; the way Langa smiles in the morning at the lemonade Reki’s dropped off on his table, trusting and knowing. How Kazuo and Kazuko twin their worries for one another, caring mirrors. It’s when he passes _Sia La Luce_ at night and catches a glimpse of Joe and Cherry wrapped in each other through the shutters. 

Behind him, on the path he’s created, is Yuka standing tall and proud and calling on her friend’s bravery to say _no_ to anything asked of her, Asahi fiercely defending Reki to unknown, unseen dangers, Hatsuko’s loud laughter ringing through an alleyway, uncouth and endearing. Langa, touching his cold hands to his face and breathing warm air against his neck. Miya, biting into an apple, laughing at Reki’s youngest sisters while they dogpile him at the dinner table. The way Shadow just _gets_ it, calm acceptance below a chaotic exterior.

He knows somewhere on that path, there’s a feral man who is a talented skater with hands strong enough to destroy. Somewhere, there’s Adam, skating on a board that Reki created with his own hands, trying to find his way out of the labyrinth.

And, as much as the path stretches behind him - dotted, every so often, with the cold, constant, soothing reminder of Langa’s eyes on him - it also stretches infinitely in front of him. Countless number of ways he could go, directions he could travel, mazes he can run. Below him, the asphalt runs below his wheels; above him, the sun bears down his spine. He will make and remake the streets of his life, and he will do it with a cold hand pressed in his.

In his mom’s embrace, he cries for what feels like hours, until he’s dehydrated and hiccuping and worries one of his sisters woke up from all the noise. The last time he cried was when he quit S, watching Langa win and feel nothing but envy. He’s had months of sadness all built up within him, months of feelings, months of emotions he’s observed and noticed and hadn’t processed, and it’s absolutely exhausting.

When he ends up sleeping through most of Sunday, his mom takes pity on him and keeps him home sick for Monday classes. He promises to be ready to go back on Tuesday, and she pets his forehead as he lies in bed and hands him some cool, sweet watermelon.

That afternoon, when the whole pack of Nanae’s friends visit him, Miya is with them.

"We needed to increase our catboy representation," Nanae explains.

Miya hisses.

Yuka rolls her eyes.

They’re sticking with _Slime Squad_ as their name. Reki wrinkles his nose. “But!” Hatsuko yells. “We’ve got a whole design story down, so you can start working on the logo!” She nods at Yuka, who pulls a folder out of her backpack and presents it to him, bowing.

“A design story, huh?” He grins. “Why does it seem like I’m doing all the work? Designing, printing, training you guys?” 

Asahi laughs. “It’s because you love us, duh.”

Spike nods, fidgeting with her earring. “You’re our Captain Slime, Reki,” she says. 

Miya looks like he’s just eaten a slug, but also like he couldn’t be happier. 

“And we love you too, or whatever, loser,” Nanae says, popping the gum in her mouth. “Mom said you can’t get it through your thick skull that other people care about you, and we have to use our words. But you’re kinda cool, I guess.” Reki grins, so wide it’s blazing.

“My sister called me cool!” He cheers. “It’s time to celebrate; who wants watermelon?”

That night, he hears the gentle hum of the motorbike, and for the first time in a long time, it’s comforting.

  
  


\---

  
  


Langa is staring at him again that Tuesday, and their teacher narrows his eyes at Reki, who shakes his head in response.

_Later,_ he mouths to Langa, who nods.

After class, he waits for Langa for the first time in a while, and the rest of their classmates watch again - some with fear in their eye, some with hope.

“Hey Langa,” he starts, fiddling with the straps of his backpack. “Do you wanna-”

“Yes,” Langa interrupts, impatient. “Absolutely yes.”

Reki smiles, bashful. “You didn’t even know what I was asking.”

“With you,” Langa says, softer, glancing towards their classmates who are leaning in to watch now, shamelessly. “With you, my answer is always yes.”

Reki’s question leads them to skate together, heading the long way toward the skatepark where Langa first nailed an ollie, where Reki taught his small pack of feral, protective, watchdog tweens, where Reki first learned to skate alongside a friend he hasn’t seen in years.

Langa follows behind him, and even though he knows his gaze is locked directly on his head, he no longer feels the chill sting, the ice; just comfort in the cold. Whenever Reki turns and looks behind him, Langa is there, with him, ready to return his joyous grin. 

When they arrive, they don’t practice tricks up the ramp, or re-write memories, because they want to make new ones. They sit, backs against a wall, feet resting on their boards, looking out onto the park as a generation of Okinawan skaters learn to love the sport.

Reki turns to Langa - who’s already looking at him - and sighs. “I’m sorry,” he begins, and Langa gasps. “I held a lot of things too close to the chest, and made you make promises you weren’t comfortable with. I thought I was holding you back, but what I should have done was _talk_ to you.” He grabs at his sweatshirt, curls his fists into the material, grounding him. “I let my own feelings get ahead of our friendship, and worst of all - I left you alone. And even though I want to say we never should have done that, I can’t. Because sometimes it just takes time and patience to heal, but sometimes we have to do things to heal. I can only hope you forgive me.” When he finishes, he looks down at his knees, hoping he’s not crying again, but he can feel the sting behind his eyes that means one small thing will push him over.

Langa is silent for a while, but then “Reki,” he breathes, and that’s enough to tip him over the edge. The tears are streaming down his face now, quietly. Langa pulls a sleeve down over his thumb, grabs Reki’s chin with the other hand to turn him this way and that, presses the fabric against his eyes to soak up some of it, but he gives up pretense quickly and just holds his face in his hands. 

“Reki,” he says again. “I missed you so much.” He taps their foreheads together.

“I never left,” Reki tries, but it only makes him cry harder.

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” Langa continues. “But I accept it anyway. And I’m sorry too; for not noticing how you were feeling, for breaking our promise, for thinking that skating was more important to me than you are.” Reki gasps.

“What?” he breathes out.

“Reki, you make my heart beat so fast.” He presses a kiss to the cheek below one of Reki’s eyes, sore and red from crying already. “You can never leave me again, okay?” He kisses the other cheek, and Reki curls his hands into Langa’s shirt, around his waist. “We’ll always be a good match, a perfect one,” he breathes into Reki’s mouth, and chases his words with a kiss. 

One of them is the beautiful, deadly snow; one of them is the brutal, burning sun. Engulfed in each other, they’re Reki and Langa, together again, building their own legacy of love. In that skatepark, their origin story, they’re two boys wrapped up together, unnoticed by the horde.

In the haze of the mid-afternoon, they’re two favored sons of Okinawa.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I waffled for a long time on whether or not Adam needed to be discussed in this fic, and finally realized that a wound you ignore is one that festers, so I brought him in. 
> 
> Anyway, thank you all for reading this! This was a very personal project for me for a lot of ways, so all of your comments and support are incredibly meaningful to me. I cannot believe that this turned into 15k words of character and relationship studies, but I hope you enjoyed this!
> 
> Maybe now, I can turn my mind back to fluff haha. 
> 
> Feel free to bug me on twitter @discokonomi

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to the wombats for the chapter titles!
> 
> chapter 2 is mostly written. feel free to bug me on twitter @discokonomi


End file.
